Interview with Former Special Agent of the FBI, Inc. Thomas F. McGorray ( ) on May 7, 2004 By Brian Hollstein

Transcription

1 Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, Inc Interview with Former Special Agent of the FBI, Inc. Thomas F. McGorray ( ) on By Brian Hollstein Edited for spelling, repetitions, etc. by Sandra Robinette on August 16, Final corrections by Mr. McGorray incorporated on December 16, Mr. McGorray was asked to review again. This final edit was completed on June 28, Final changes made on December 5, Hollstein Or H: Today s date is 7 th of May, 2004 and we re at the Marriott in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Tom, Thomas, McGorray, just to get things started here, your date of birth? McGorray Or M: November 20 th, H: Okay. And where were you born? M: Buffalo, New York. H: We ve got a lot to talk about off-line. My family s from Buffalo. And your current address? M: I m in Tucson, Arizona. H: I went to school up there, University of Buffalo, for a year. M: Oh. My brother, both my brothers, went there. H: Oh. Would you read this? It deals with the Society owning the copyright to everything we talk about. M: Here we go. We, the undersigned, convey the rights to the intellectual content of our interview on this date,, to the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI. This transfer is in exchange for the Society s efforts to preserve the historical legacy of the FBI and its members. We understand that portions of this interview may be deleted for security purposes. Unless otherwise restricted, we agree that acceptable sections can be published on the world-wide-web and the recordings transferred to an established repository for preservation and research.

2 Page 2 H: Okay. Good. If you d please sign that and while you re signing, I ll talk a little bit about the process. We ll do the interview today. It will go in for a transcription. And then the paper will come back to you, the transcript, to be reviewed for accuracy and for spelling and a variety of things. And once you approve of it, then we can present it to the Bureau for passing for publication. Now much of the stuff we re going to be talking about and your career is quite new. Quite recent I mean. And there s a very good chance that it will not be coming out in the near future. Most of the material that we get is twenty-five years or older and it s declassified. M: Oh, just the Panther stuff is twenty-five H: Yeah. So it goes back. M: And Martin Luther King was H: Yeah. So it s very likely that most of this is public knowledge at this point or could be public knowledge. But, anyway, that s how the process works. We intend to place the archives with a major university. We re talking to the University of Virginia, Georgetown. We re probably going to contact Yale and see if they re interested. M: Whose web page are you talking about? Would it be off the FBI s web page? H: No, no. We haven t done anything with it yet. M: Off the Society s web page? H: It could possibly also be off of like the University of Virginia or something like that. But we re saying it as a possibility. We don t know exactly how it s going to work. But the idea is that it would be available to the public. M: Okay. Couple little ground rules. No informants names please. If you want to refer to an informant, give him a pseudonym of some kind of another or just talk around it. However you want to do that. We want to avoid libel in terms of untrue statements about people. And we don t want to talk about currently used sources or methods of operation. But aside from that, let s get started here. And if you would please, give me your dates of service, where you served. Just quickly. 2

3 Page 3 H: And then we ll go back and start in with questions and things. M: I went to training school and immediately to Atlanta. H: What year was that? M: I graduated and went in September 30 th. Graduated December 27, Reported to Atlanta, first of January And in those days you were there for one year. But I broke my leg so I ended up staying there two years. H: Uh, huh. M: And then I went to language school in Monterey CA for Polish. H: Why did you do that? M: Because I had taken an aptitude exam and they just sent me a teletype and said: You re on your way to Monterey. I didn t get to choose my language. H: (chuckle) M: But I did real well. I read French. And then I had quite a bit of Latin. Years of Latin and French. So I had a lot of language background. And then when I finished Polish school, I went to Washington Field Office from 66 to 68. And I worked in three squads there, including the Ernie Belter s language squad. I went to New Haven to handle Polish interviews in New Britain, Connecticut. Ended up in New Haven and handled Polish matters but there wasn t enough to keep me full-time so I ended up working, at that time Racial Matters, Extremist Matters, Black Panther Party. And that case launched me to the Bureau as a supervisor. I went to Division 6, from 72 to 76. H: And you were the supervisor? M: Yes, first of all, I was over in Name Check Section, doing Foreign Name Checks for over a year. And then six months on the TFIS Desk and then fourteen months, as the night supervisor, from midnight to eight. Division 6. H: Uh, huh. Just for people reading this in the future, TFIS is? M: Theft from Interstate Shipment. 3

4 Page 4 H: That s right. M: ITSP was Interstate Transport of Stolen Property. H: You were night supervisor and that s when you got all this stuff together for Hoover or the Director? M: Oh, he s dead by now. This is 76. He died May of 72. H: Yeah. M: Then I put a memo in to get out of Washington. And they asked me if I wanted to be the Senior RA in Tucson and I said: Yes. So I went to the Tucson RA. H: And that was when? M: I went to Tucson in H: Tucson. M: I m sorry. H: In 76. You were at the Bureau then? M: From 72 to 76 roughly. H: Okay. 72 to 76. Good. And then you finished your career then in Tucson? M: No, I transferred laterally up to Sacramento as a supervisor. H: When was that? M: In And I m a supervisor from 79 to 83. And I did all my inspections. They wanted me to go to New York as an ASAC and I ended up stepping down and going to the Auburn RA, north of Sacramento which covered Yuba City and South Lake Tahoe. H: Not bad. M: No, no. 4

5 Page 5 M: And so that s where I got involved with the Sikhs and the Sikh terrorist [who is alleged to have] who paid $100,000 to have Indira Gandhi murdered. But we could never put a case together because we couldn t get any witnesses who would testify. The Sikhs are very XXXXXXXXXX-- would have had him killed. H: I m sure. You finished off then in Auburn or did you? M: Yeah. I finished in I retired out of Auburn. And my last big case was the Coddington Kidnapping Murder Case. I don t know if you remember that case. This genius conned these two girls to come over from Reno to Southlake to ostensibly make an anti-drug movie. The two old women who were chaperones at the school where they were, a finishing school where they taught them how to walk and all that kind of stuff. These are only teenage girls. They came over. He immediately took them to his place in Southlake. Murdered the two older women, with plastic flexicuffs. Strangled them. Had the two girls blindfolded and then molested the two girls. He was a homosexual. It was a really good case. H: We ll come back to it, okay? M: Okay. You know how this stuff fits in the big picture. H: Well, let s walk through your career and these highlights you talked me about. After you d gone to Monterey, you had that Polish walk-in. M: No, no, the Polish case is in New Haven. H: Alright. So, was there something before that then? M: Well, the Martin Luther King tech. H: Okay, let s go to that. Sure. M: {It] was in Atlanta, Georgia. And that ties into the fact that I got held over for a year because of my broken leg. 5

6 Page 6 H: Yeah. Let s go into that then. M: Okay. H: You broke your leg and got put onto the tech. M: Right. It was an apartment on the twenty-second floor across from the office in downtown Atlanta. And we had everything in the closets. All the recorders. It was the old-fashioned stuff. The reels. But anyways, you know, we had control of all the recorders. And so you just kept going around till you picked up interesting messages. No way you could cover everything. H: Uh huh. M: But on a daily basis --- H: How many? M: Twenty-five lines. H: Twenty-five lines. M: It s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Two lines at King s house and two lines at his apartment. Now Tuesday was the day he would go to his apartment and, you know,, which had nothing to do with our case. But our case was captioned The Communist Infiltration of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It was not a case against Martin Luther King. H: Uh, huh. M: And it was a legal tech. We had full Justice authority for setting the thing up. And a clerk from the office would work during the daylight hours when SCLC was open and we would scan all the messages and anything. We kept logs of the ones that we felt were worthwhile keeping. And we recorded, you know, many others. And then at five o clock the clerk would go home and I would be on for the rest of the night. But, by usually, by ten, eleven or twelve o clock there would be no action. You could actually sleep with a buzzer system that would wake you up if any calls came in. H: Late calls, yeah. 6

7 Page 7 M: And they did come in. Again, it has nothing to do with the, it s a moral issue and has nothing to do with our case and stuff. H: It has in later on times --- M: Yeah. H: --- because we were looked upon as blue noses and making up stories, you know, about his actions just to discredit him. M: Yeah. But it was very interesting at the time that he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He and SCLC was taking in $14,000 a day in donations. Which is pretty generous. H: Oh yeah. M: And, his stock was pretty high. They had a pretty good size staff. One of the really good guys in the whole thing was, was Andy Young. A pretty straight shooter and a good man. I don t know how much of this stuff he knew ---. H: Probably less, certainly less than what you knew anyway. M: Oh yeah. But he came across., he came across as one of the more stable, more decent people that worked there. H: I gather no indications of, well, did you ever get anything that showed communist infiltration? M: Oh yeah. H: Right. And we could never tell --. You know, you had about 20 million Black Americans in the balance here. M: And, but,, you never could figure out, you know, where was this going and who s wagging it. 7

8 Page 8 H: So it wasn t conclusive at all, but it was certainly tempting. M: Oh yeah. Well, you know, there was no question that there was frequent contact. You can t call King a communist because he talked to two guys that are members of the Communist Party, USA. H: Was he looking for support, financial support? M: Oh yeah. He was trying to get any financial help that he could get. But he did talk about his meeting with Hoover. Did you know that he went to Washington? H: Right. M: Met with Hoover. H: Well, he s not the only one to complain about that. M: Yeah, well, as I say, it was fascinating. I was a young first-office Agent and so, I mean,. H: So they didn t require you to turn it off,? M: No, no.. H: Well, good. M: I mean I did these rough-draft logs but I never, I never, you know. We sent it across the street and there were a couple of Agents working the case. I never really saw a finished product. I never saw a report or how the stuff, or what subsequent leads. H: How it fell together with other informants? M: Yeah, all I know is that if today Andrew Young or Coretta King gets on the TV or radio, I don t have to be in the room. H: (chuckle) You recognize their voices right away. M: I have no trouble. I mean, it s amazing after a couple of months of how accurate you get. H: Well, --- 8

9 Page 9 M: Oh, no. H:. M: I guess it was just the pressure of the times, you know. Again, I don t know. H: And, just, just interesting. So there was, M: I can t remember it. I can probably find out. H: Well, whatever. You didn t read in any particular political leanings along those lines then? M: No. H: Huh. M: And, I m not making this up. I mean, I read this someplace and I don t know if it was just, you know, propaganda or someone actually H: Yeah, it s just hard to separate all of this stuff out now. M: But, to me, that was interesting, you know, because, I mean,. H: Oh, is that right? 9

10 Page 10 M: H: Oh boy. M: Because that s one of the things I thought, you know, at least the guy when he was young was idealistic. And, you know, probably a good minister and stuff. H: Yeah. M: I had trouble with that. H: Well, I guess a lot of people did. And unfortunately it got out and then caused a lot, a lot of grief otherwise. M: Well, I did not consider myself, my own person, to be a bigot or, I mean, I had, I was very pro-civil rights and very much in favor of the Black man, you know, getting full rights and everything. And I worked a lot of civil rights stuff besides this. I mean, I worked the Penn murder case which was another case. Really felt bad for Lemuel Penn who was murdered in Athens, Georgia, by Klansmen. H: You know, I ve talked to a lot of people just in general and then getting into this oral history side of things and I have yet to meet anybody that I would describe as a racist at all. And I meet a lot of very practical people that saw things that they didn t like but --- M: Well, you know, one of the things that came up out of the King things was that Hoover called King publicly the most notorious liar that ever lived or something to that effect. It made the papers and I m not sure to this day what the specifics on that were. What he was referring to. But one of the allegations that King and SCLC made against the FBI was that we had packed our southern offices with red necks, southern boys, southern Agents who were red necks. And in Atlanta at that time, I think Columbus, Georgia, was one of the places they were talking about and four of the five Agents that were stationed there. Millard was a southern boy but the other four guys were from New York City. (chuckle). It was pretty --. It wasn t, you know, accurate at all. H: Well I know that because I was stationed down in Tampa in 67 and there were all northerners. 10

11 Page 11 M: Now somewhere during all this, and I m not sure of the timing on it, somebody released some kind of tape or something of, and either sent it to Coretta King, to the effect that he was fooling around and that kind of stuff. And I don t know who did that or who authorized that or where that came from. H: Uh huh. M: There was a lot of speculation, but I think that s semi-public knowledge that s been --- H: Yeah, yeah, that s been in books and things. Finishing out in Atlanta, anything else while you were down there that would be of interest? M: Well, I think the Lemuel Penn murder case. Penn was a Ph.D. educator out of Washington, DC, and had just finished a two-week tour in, you know, summer reserve camp in Georgia and was heading back up to Washington, DC, with two other companions. They were passing through Athens, Georgia, at midnight, downtown Athens, and they switched drivers. Well then, Lemuel Penn took over the driving. The other two guys, because they were driving all the way through, back up to Washington, DC, through the night. And the other two guys went to sleep and they started out of Athens, north, and four Klansmen observed them changing drivers. The fact that they were black and stuff. Followed them out. Came along side. And with two shotguns they killed Penn, the driver, and the car went into a cornfield. And the other two guys were scared as hell, but they scrambled into the cornfield. The Klansmen came back and didn t see any movement and just went on of course. President Johnson ordered the FBI in the next morning. That we had no, technically, no jurisdiction. M: And so, about twenty of us, or thirty of us, under Joe Casper were sent there on a special to solve the case. Bob Kane who was the senior, was the Resident Agent in Athens, one-man RA at the time, had a pretty good idea who the four Klansmen were. So we put two-man teams on the four guys and within three weeks we had a confession from the driver, a nine-page confession. He was having mental problems. And so anyways, he kind of gave us the whole story and we took it to state court and, of course, they threw it out. Threw the confession out. And one of the four Klansmen, I can t remember his name, but he shot his wife in the face within a year. We ended up going after the four of them under the old 18 something Civil Rights Act. Convicted them. H: Under Lincoln, wasn t it? 11

12 Page 12 M: Yeah, yeah, but it was a good piece of work. But it was scary. We actually had to put a third man in the back seat on the surveillances because they were coming around following us. Harassing us. You know, we were in their territory. And those guys, they re nuts. H: Well, there are a lot of members of the KKK were in the police and sheriffs offices. M: Yeah, oh yeah, these guys were not --- H: So you had no friends. M: No, and they weren t afraid of us. You know, Joe Casper, years later at an inservice, was telling everybody when he was opening up the new academy, he was saying: If you want to work for me, you re going to have to publish or perish. Then he said: When I was down in Athens, I said, things were so bad in the Klan, the Klan was following us around. I had to sit in the back seat of the car with the surveilling Agents with a shotgun just to make sure we didn t --. And I m sitting there. (chuckle) He never left the command center. I don t know if you want that in there. H: (chuckle) No, I don t think that will hurt. M: Yeah, and so I talked to him afterwards. Oh, he said, you re right. I wasn t actually in the car. (chuckle) What a character! H: We all get carried away once in a while. M: Yeah. H: You know, at the time, in thinking back on it now, I do remember the names and all. M: But I remember the two blacks who were in the car with Penn. And they came back for their clothes and stuff. And, after, you know, they brought them up later. So I got to meet them. Really two nice guys and they were just devastated. I really felt compassion for these poor guys. I mean they had been through the trauma and everything. I mean, you know, they did nothing, weren t trouble makers, just changing drivers. H: Minding their business. M: On their way home from, you know, doing their military business. 12

13 Page 13 H: Were they in uniform at the time? M: No, no. But you know, to me, it was really just a tragic case. H: Just madness. M: Lemuel, you know, Penn, you know, of course I got to find out a little about his background. He was a fine man. You know, educator in Washington and probably worked his tail off to get his Ph.D. and stuff and --- H: And these characters are probably nobodies --- M: Oh, they were --- H: --- or less. M: --- low white trash. You know what I mean, really bad news. But anyways, it was a pretty exciting case and, you know, it was nice to know we put together, at least we got to the truth. Now it was pretty disheartening for them to throw that nine-page thing because it had all the details, and who shot, and who had the guns, and who was driving. It wasn t like maybe. This was what happened. H: And you didn t have enough forensic evidence to --- M: No --- H: --- go with that. M: Well the State of George wasn t going to --- H: They weren t going to --- M: --- at that time, I mean. H: What was, roughly what year was that? M: Well, it had to be before I broke my leg. So it had to be probably early 64. Wait a minute. No. Let s see, I finished training class in 63. January 64, probably it was middle 64. I m not sure if it was summertime or not. But, yeah, in H: Okay. M: Now I have some clippings at home with more detail if you want them. 13

14 Page 14 H: Yeah. That s one of the things I like to ask people too. If you have any personal papers at home. M: These are open sources. Newspaper clippings on cases. H: I ll give you my card. M: Code name for the case was PENVIC. H: What was the VIC for here? M: I don t know. H: That was his partner? M: Penn Victim, I guess. H: Oh yeah. M: Penn was the victim that was murdered. H: That s good. So that was a hell of a way to start off in your first office. Must have made it tough for the rest of your career. M: No, no. H: Both of these things. M: That s one of the things I say. I m a guy that can t say no to anybody. You know, if there s something going on in the office, I want to be there. I want to be part of it. I was always that way. You know, I know there are guys that are just the opposite. They don t want to get involved. H: They usually just disappear. (chuckle) M: They disappear or leave. H: Or in the men s room at the time. 14

15 Page 15 M: Well, we had a guy, Ray, he was a great guy but he was a character. And he, in his later years, in New Haven, he had the Yale SDS during the school year and he would in the summertime take off for his place in Rhode Island and be gone all summer. He closed the case down for the summertime. (chuckle) You know, but anyways, when the bank robbery bell would ring, Ray would shoot down the back stairs and jump in the car and go over to Sears and shop. (chuckle) And I m not kidding you. And he didn t make any bones about it. You know, he said: I m not working those bank robberies. I m on the security side. H: Well, let s get you over into Washington Field. M: Okay. H: After you finished your Polish training in Monterey --- M: Yeah, I was on Ernie Belter s squad, all four of us, each day. And, it was interesting. My Polish was not as good as some of the guys. Several of the guys were natural speakers. You know, came from Polish families. Osynski, Pete Osynski, and Pramik and couple of the other guys. H: And then McGorray shows up. M: McGorray shows up. (chuckle) Well, one of the funny things --.. H: Yeah. M: You know, trying to figure out what. But, anyways, I used to hate that. So anyways, I got off that and went and chased for six months. H: Now What is that? M: 15

16 Page 16 M: H: Yeah. M: H: Uh, huh. Right. Just walked on. M: So, so it was a real --. Then if they. That s what they were there for. H: Uh, huh. M: Which was no big deal. But again, you had to identify them. H: So these were. Okay. In New York, they were in the, it was called, up in New York. And the same, same. M: But it was a fun kind of thing. It was a lot of fun because it was very little paper and you really had to be clever. I took one young Russian guy into one of the museums down at the Smithsonian. M: I ll never forget it, I went over to the policeman, the guard there, and I said, you know: I m with the FBI and I need to know who that fellow is. I need to identify him. Well, he said, I can do that. He says, I can handle that. He goes over and he grabs the guy and literally arrests him. (chuckle) Takes his wallet and brings it over to me. H: (chuckle) Real subtle. 16

17 Page 17 M: I was embarrassed as hell. But I took the, you know, took the information and got the hell out of there as fast as I could. (chuckle) It might be a rental car so you had to worry about. But you had the vehicle he was in. Sometimes you had to go to the rental agency. But, you know, I don t know if you ever worked leads. H: No, we did a lot of surveillance. I was in Organized Crime in New York. M: But I mean anywhere in the Bureau, you might get a lead off this kind of thing. H: Oh, yeah, yeah. M: H: M: But for me, that was a fun job because you could use your imagination. You could be creative about how am I going to figure out this guy. And I really took it seriously. I didn t like anybody getting away with, unless I knew who in the hell he was, (chuckle) or had a pretty good chance we d find out who he was. H: So then --- M: You did strange things. M: And this damn, you know, and people, you know, you re walking down the street and you re mumbling and people are looking at. You know, Washington s got a lot of weirdoes. H: Oh, yeah. M: Crazy guys. H: Let s tell people who are listening to this rather than seeing it. And so, M:. 17

18 Page 18 H: A little sheet of paper or something. M: That you picked up at the office..h: In your right hand you had a little microphone. M:. H: Earpiece. Yeah. M: So you could talk. H: Those were good times. And you did that most of the while you were there in Washington? M: No, just for six months. And then I went and worked And for Redfield. And enjoyed that. Nothing really spectacular there. We didn t have anything big. And then they called me one day and they said they needed a Polish speaker in New Haven. And Mr. Hoover wants to know in fifteen minutes who s going. (chuckle) And I said: Well, what are my options? Well, you re the second youngest guy on the squad that speaks Polish. Gibbons has already told us that he s going back to New York to practice law. He s the younger guy. And he says: I don t know that you have any options. So you d better call your wife and find out if she --. Well, she was from Massachusetts so it worked out good. H: Oh yeah. M: We lived, we lived in Madison Oaks. Wonderful town. H: You d be a member of the Connecticut Chapter today if you were still there. So then up to New Haven and then this Polish guy shows up at the door. M: Okay. I think that came later on. I think the Panther case broke first. H: Oh, okay. Let s go with that. M: I don t remember the exact date, but anyways, Erica Huggins, the husband, John Huggins, was a Panther but I think he was affiliated with the Los Angeles Chapter. He was murdered by US people, and don t ask me what US stands for, but it s another rival black gang at that time in Los Angeles. H: US. Can we try to spell it even? 18

19 Page 19 M: Just US. United something. H: And this is in LA? M: In LA. So his father was a trustee, a black man, but he was a trustee at Yale University, so they brought his body back to New Haven for burial and had a big funeral for him. And the Panthers out of New York came up to support, you know, to be at the funeral. H: Uh, huh. M: And so I got the ticket because Bob Puckett, the regular case Agent that worked racial matters, was home at his father s funeral in Kentucky. So ASAC Ted Gunderson said: You got it. So I got together with a couple of other guys on the squad and we got our cameras and everything set up and took photographs of all the New York Panthers at the funeral. And I thought that was it. You know, we d do our little report when it s over with. Well, they turn around and establish five chapters in the State of Connecticut. Erica Huggins and Warren Kimbro were the two main characters in New Haven at 37 Sylvan Avenue, the Panther Headquarters. And so we started, we opened the case on the Black Panther Party. Then along with this an informant in Boston, XXXXXXXXXX, who was of the Panthers in New Haven, went up to Boston, told the Boston Panthers that Gunderson was causing them problems in New Haven and had to be eliminated. XXXXXX goes up to a chapter meeting in Boston and tells them that we got to do something with this guy, this FBI guy Gunderson. So the Panther informant in Boston reports it and they send a teletype to the Bureau and the Bureau comes back and tells New Haven to interview every Panther in the State of Connecticut to see if they re a part of this conspiracy. Well, it turned out to be a good thing. We put teams together, four guys, and we interviewed about a dozen Panthers all the way from Hartford down to Stanford and developed two really good informants out of it. You know, that we were able to turn and work for us from then on. And then, we had a pretty good source and I even started developing a bunch of informants. I had one guy whose nickname was XXXXXXX and he couldn t read or write. And he used to have. Dapper guy, but every day he went into Panther Headquarters and chitchatted with them. Told him come back. Told me who was there. Had a really good handle on it. You know, who was in town. 19

20 Page 20 H: Sure, sure. M: There d be a guy selling newspapers, the Black Panther paper on the corner. I d call XXXXXXXXXXX and tell him: Get down there and find out who that guy is and where he s from. But it was no big deal. We just knew who was there and what they were doing. Then bingo the next thing we know this guy, Alex Rackley, who was slightly retarded, was seen coming out of a police station in New York City and the Panthers thought he was an informant. H: Uh, oh. M: So they kidnapped him and brought him to 37 Sylvan Avenue and tortured him for four nights, days and nights, in the basement. Burned him with cigarettes and tried to get him to confess to being an informant. And he wasn t. You know, he wasn t. The poor guy, what can you confess to if you re not --. You know, they want you to say you re an informant and he didn t even know what in the hell an informant was. H: Huh. M: So anyways, in the meantime, George Sams, from national back out west but also was mentally not there comes into town. He meets with them and he interviews Rackley. M: Bobby Seale comes to town. He was one of the national leaders and they tell him about this guy Rackley in the basement and Seale says: Ice him. And gets the hell out of town. And so they take him out the next day and kill him. H: So all of this came from informants? M: No, --- H: --- this information? M: Well, this is a summation of what happened. It s informant information. It s part of the trial, affidavit. I took statements from a whole bunch of folks but basically Warren Kimbro, Lonnie McLucas, and George Sams drive him out to the country outside New Haven. I m not sure now who shot who, but, because this came, got to be a big deal. Was he dead after the first bullet? 20

21 Page 21 M: But, I think, Kimbro shoots him in the chest and they walk back to the car and then he tells McLucas to go back and put a bullet in his head and make sure he s dead. Or vice versa. There s two bullets and he s dead. And they find the body a couple of days later and, you know, we open up a major case. In the meantime we re getting rumors that they killed him. H: Yeah. M: And, of course, we didn t know at the time. We didn t even know he was in town. We didn t know who the hell Rackley was. This is, a lot of this is coming out after, you know, weeks and weeks of investigation. But those are a bit of the basic facts of what happened. And, of course, the situation in New Haven at the time was the Irish Chief of Police who was big, very high in the Democratic Party, Ahearn, Jim Ahearn and his brother was the Chief of Detectives. They had a bunch of Italian detectives who were there because they knew somebody and they weren t very good police officers. And so, Arnie Marco who was the State s Attorney for, for the State of Connecticut, in New Haven, asked for our help putting this case together. Because we already had a case going and we had a lot of information. H: But it was a state murder case? M: It was a state murder case. H: Yeah. M: All my 302s ended up in state court. And I took statements from a couple of gals there that knew he had been murdered. They hadn t been privy to the murder. But we put a really good case together and convicted the three guys of murder. H: Seale didn t get pulled in on this? M: No, no. Marco made the decision that he would go for the three killers in one trial. He would go for conspiracy against Erica Huggins and Bobby Seale for the conspiracy case to commit murder. And they hired this guy from San Francisco, Gray, real-well known attorney out there. He did a hell of a job and got them off. H: He got them off? M: Off the conspiracy charge. H: Yeah. 21

22 Page 22 M: So we lost that case. But in the meantime, the whole State of Connecticut, I mean, the Chicago Seven are there, we got fifteen thousand radicals on the green happy that Yale University is, you know, out campaigning for the Panthers and all this nonsense about, you know, injustice and police brutality and all this kind of stuff. And, course, there s other stuff going on around the country. There s a big shoot-out. H: Oh yeah. There s stuff going on all over. M: Yeah, in Chicago. And a big shoot-out in LA and stuff. David Hilliard s writing books. Of course, Seale is making speeches everywhere and he s on national television and some of the guys from the Chicago Seven are, you know, they re, you know, it s just a big propaganda oriented. I don t know, if you remember. H: Tough times. M: Of yeah. And of course these damn Panthers, they re putting out this publication every week, Off the Pig. I mean, it s a four-page rag and a big picture of a guy with a gun and all that. Off the pig is the theme and so policemen are scared to death that they re going to get a bullet in the back, you know. H: Yeah, just out minding their business on patrol. M: And while this is all going on or right after this, I can t remember the timing, there s a gal named Angela Davis who becomes a top-ten fugitive out of Los Angeles. And we get information that there s a look-alike over at Panther Headquarters at 37 Sylvan Avenue. H: Huh. You know, it s not a safe area. So anyways, at nighttime when we get dropped off and we get the landlord of the house across the street. These crazy old houses. They had stairways that would take you up to the attic. But wouldn t take you into the house. M: And so he unlocked that door and we were able to go up these stairs into the attic across the street. But she was up on the third floor, allegedly. Staying there. Hiding there. So we re up there with cameras and there s rats all over the place. You talk about a scary night. (chuckle) And you know, we hear creaking. There s people living in the house. H: Sure, sure. You don t know whether it s somebody coming up the stairs. 22

23 Page 23 M: Jeez. So anyways we spend the whole night there. We get a bunch of photographs of her through the window and stuff. The bottom line, it turns out it wasn t Angela Davis. It was some other gal with an Afro haircut, you know. H: Uh, huh. M: Looked very similar. I mean, you re not supposed to say they all look alike, but when they all had this Afro, they do look alike. H: Yeah. And at a distance. M: Oh yeah. No way you could say yea or nay. But it turned out after we found out who she really was. All this time I m ending up with a paper monstrosity. All during this thing, the Bureau orders twelve guys in to man a tech on Panthers Headquarters. Twelve Agents came to New Haven. And I m this little second-office Agent (chuckle) who specializes in Polish and I got this team of fifteen guys working for me fulltime, eighteen hours a day. And I m writing these reports, 250-page reports for George Moore at the Bureau. But anyways, we put them out of business. And when this thing was all over, at the trial and everything, they owed the airlines $65,000 and their credit was dead. M: In the meantime right after this, Sam Napier, who was the editor of the Black Panther magazine, newspaper, that they used to get 25 cents a copy for this foursheet rag, but it kept them --- H: --- kept them going financially, yeah M: --- kept them going financially. He gets killed down in New York. H: Tough crowd. M: So yeah. So now they don t have anybody else that can print a paper. He could read and write. And so they re hurting for money and they just kind of dissipated and fell apart. H: All gone now. M: They re all gone. You know, but they had a breakfast program for children and they were purporting to be these great humanitarians and everything and it was all so much ---. H: So when did this Polish guy show up? 23

24 Page 24 M: Okay. I m not sure of the date on that. But I m up in the New Britain RA working. I get this airtel from the Bureau that So this guy comes knocking on the door. You know, and I had just read this. You know, I had just gotten this airtel and then was starting to, trying to find out who and where this guy was. And one of my leads was going to go down the hall and see if the Polish girls who worked at the Draft Board knew this guy. So anyways, he knocks on the door and I find out who he is. I send him down the hall to the two gals that are working for the Selective Service people and tell them to interview him very thoroughly in Polish, cause their Polish, I mean, they re natives. I mean, they re really brilliant. H: So you have --. I didn t realize that --. A lot of Polish speakers up there? M: There was a factory in New Britain. And one of the requirements to bring Polish people, immigrants, into the country was you had to guarantee them a job. And these two brothers, the Budnego brothers, had this factory. Don t ask me what they made. I used to do my interviews up in their conference room. Both of these guys were big game hunters. They had one of everything. I mean, elephants, tigers, sticking out of the wall, you know. H: (chuckle) Oh, wow. M: But they had a lot of money and they were in good shape. Their thing was they would almost guarantee anybody a menial job to get them into this country. The trouble was though, that a lot of these young guys would not ever work on their English. They d stay in New Britain for ever. It s changed now. But at that time it was like Hamtramck, one of those places. H: Yeah, I remember Buffalo. M: Yeah, you don t have to learn English. You can get along with your Polish. Because there are so many Polish speakers. H: I had a great aunt who sounded, who was born here in the US, she sounded like Lawrence Welk. M: Yeah. It was just one of those fascinating cases because the guy,. 24

25 Page 25 M: And it s really complicated. And I had never seen this or knew anything about this. Agent Bob Sivula came from New York and we spent two weeks with this guy and put together a couple of reports and stuff. But it was just fascinating. H: So you, he tried to get into the military. You got him at that point? M: We caught him. and your American wife and your kid are staying here. But if you cooperate with us, we ll get you a job and you can stay here. H: Good deal. M: So he cooperated. H: Roughly, when was this? What year? M: Well, I m in New Haven from 68 to 72. I go to the Bureau in 72. I got two incentive awards from this case. I m saying, I m thinking it s got to be probably 1970 or 71, in there. Again, I don t know if I have anything on that because all that stuff, all the paper on that was classified secret. H: So he ended up cooperating. You spent a lot of time with him. M: H: You didn t know what happened to the guy? And then I got transferred. 25

26 Page 26 M: I asked several times if that case was still --. And they told him that s basically what they wanted to do with him. Of course, the cold war is over now. I don t know. H: New crowd over in Warsaw. M: Yeah. Once I left New Haven, you know, I lost, I talked to guys but I can t remember who the heck took over my Polish work. There were two or three guys that came in there for a short period. H: It was a good successful one though. M: Yeah, yeah. And for me it was a real eye opener. I mean, I thought all of this was a lot of BS and, you know, I didn t think anybody really. First of all, in Polish school they never taught us the word for. H: Uh, huh. (chuckle) M: You know, your vocabulary is, I was interviewing guys and they speak so fast because they are just over from the old country. You got to keep telling them to slow down. And then you got to really work at it. I d come home with headaches from translating. H: Oh, yeah. M: Eight guys in one day. It was hard work. But it was, you know, this was very satisfying. This kind of, really made it all worthwhile because H: It s rare that you meet under the circumstances. M: Yeah, I don t think they had any idea. It fell right into place. I mean, you get a lead like that. You know, H: It worked. Give it to the FBI. That s all we had. And we started out with the case. 26

27 Page 27 M: Well, we had Bob Sivula. He was a very savvy Agent from New York whose Polish was a hell of a lot better than mine. He was a natural. You know, probably spoke it at home with his mother and father. H: Yeah, that helps. M: So yeah. And he enjoyed the case. It was one of his best cases that he ever had. Because Polish spies are not big in, you know, you hear a lot of Top Hat and all the Russian spy cases but, you know, this was one of them. H: Not too much of Polish spies. M: The few exciting Polish cases that I ever heard of, you know. H: So after this is when you headed down to DC. M: Yeah. Then I went to DC and then I worked on the Foreign Name Check Section over in Ident and did thousands of name checks. It was kind of different. We did them. We did them for. We did them for, whatever the hell they re called. Myself and one other guy. I worked for two or three guys. Anyway, the guy I worked with was a Unit Chief, 15. If you did a name check on a guy who, you know, we had an active case over on Division 5, you had to coordinate before --. On your yellow copy you had Coordinated with So and So, CI6, Division 5. You had to call that guy and say: Is it okay to give this, or can we give this to? You know, so you d have to send them a copy. H: You d have to be very careful of the whole thing. So you went through that side of it and you mentioned that once you got out of and? M: Worked for TFIS for six months. H: Yeah. M: And then I went fourteen months on the night desk. H: And you went to Tucson. M: And then I went to Sacramento. And then Auburn. H: And was it up in Auburn that you had this Sikh case? 27

28 Page 28 M: Yeah. H: Were there any other highlights in between there? No more Polish spies? New Haven extremists? M: When I came to Tucson, I was a supervisor. And we had Joe Bonano and Pete Licavoli operating there. And we had a five-man squad and we were bagging Bonano s garbage every day. That was pretty interesting. And, we had a guy named Bill, just died, Bill Christiansen. He and Skip George, and a couple of other guys, Don Sickles. They would put overalls on and go pick up the garbage every day. You know, and, of course the Bureau --. They signed in time on the three card. (chuckle). These are guys that, you know, out picking up this guy s garbage at 6 in the morning. They re not worried about whether they re putting their overtime in. But anyways, it was really interesting. Christiansen got so good that he could --. You know, Bonano used to go to the phone booth with cryptic notes, half in Sicilian and half in English, and would call his New York contacts and then go back to his house and throw the damn thing in the garbage. D Concini set up a drug task force and one of the guys working on that task force, who was not Bureau, was an ex-telephone guy. And they had, what do you call it when you can, you re allowed to get the number but not listen in? H: Pen register? M: Pen registers. They had pen registers set up but they didn t have authority for wire tap. But this guy was an ex-telephone guy. So he decided that he would change the wires around, make a few recordings, take them over to the Pima County Sheriff s office, to a guy who speaks Italian and see what the hell Joe Bonano s saying. Well, the guy there goes to the sheriff. The sheriff calls the US Attorney. The US Attorney calls me. H: Oh, boy. M: And I call the SAC. You know, all hell breaks loose. And, Bud Gaskill was the SAC. I said, you know, I obviously have a conflict of interest. I mean I can t interview these guys, but we need to come up there to Phoenix and have them interviewed by a supervisor in Phoenix and take statements to the effect that they weren t involved in this. Well, thank God, the guy that did this, eventually it made the paper and everything, and he copped out saying nobody else was involved. at the Bureau. But I would have been transferred I m sure. H: Oh yeah, yeah. 28

29 Page 29 M: And, so, we got out of that thing. There were a lot of things going on. I remember some. The craziest thing was somebody from Dallas calls. He makes it in the paper that Joe Bonano got this high price lawyer out of Miami. Pays him big bucks and all this kind of stuff. And this was an AP release or something. So somebody from Dallas calls the lawyer in Miami and tells him that they re going to get Joe Bonano. They re going to get him. And so, the next thing we know, we got orders to go out to Joe Bonano s house and interview him and find out who s trying to kill him. (chuckle) So we go out there, myself and another Agent, you know, he s right out of the Godfather. You know, Would you like some wine? H: Oh yeah. M: Come right in. Of course there s a guy with a machine gun in front of the house. In Arizona you can have them. And, we tell him why we re there. The bottom line was it was no big deal. Two women who were infuriated that this guy was allowed to operate in our country, decided they re going to threaten him through the Miami lawyer. So they made this crazy phone call. H: Wakes everybody up though. That s important. M: But during this time, I don t know if you know the history behind the Lou Peters Award. H: Some of it, yeah. M: But all of that developed during that time. And you had a Cadillac dealer over in California and everything and that whole thing --. All happened under my watch. I mean, at that time we didn t, you know --. Number one, we didn t know that Lou Peters would turn out to be the splendid guy to testify nor that he would die, you know, shortly, you know, and turn out to be the hero we hold him up to be today. H: Well, he certainly did the right thing. M: Yeah. H: And under difficult circumstances. No question about it. 29

30 Page 30 M: But all this time, you got the son, Bill Bonano, who was the biggest phony that s ever come down the pike. I mean, you know, talking. This guy, you got a couple reporters in Tucson that they still think he s a good guy and, you know, his father never did anything wrong, you know. Never ordered anybody killed. H: Who says you can t buy friends, right? M: Oh yeah. But I mean, you know, you just shake your head. I hear this one guy on the radio, just a couple of months ago, he was on there and telling everybody what a good friend Bill Bonano --. Because he s written this book. I don t know if you ve read it. H: No, I haven t read it. M: And, I can t remember the name of it, but it s all about him and his father and what, you know, great folks they are. H: There seems to be a lot of revisionists, I ll tell you. Rosenbergs sons have written a book now. M: Yeah. Well, you know, talking about the Rosenbergs. It s too bad because, you know, we had Bob Lamphear down in Green Valley and everything I know from him after I retired. But he was a vast source of information on the Rosenbergs. He was probably the leading expert we had. He died, you know, a couple of years of ago. H: Yeah. M: But he would have been the guy I would have told you to get a hold of right away. H: Oh yeah. M: Because he was involved in the Venona Papers, the codes and stuff. You know, he actually was helpful in breaking them. H: We re losing these guys right and left. We re not getting to them. M: He got up at our meetings several times. He wrote that book The FBI and KGB Wars. I don t now if you ve read that. H: I haven t read it, but I ve heard of it. 30

31 Page 31 M: Be a good one, be a good one. In fact, you should know about it if you re talking to anybody about the Rosenberg case or about the KGB, there s so much in that book. H: I ll have to pick it up. M: Even though he s no longer with us. H: At least, we got what he wrote. M: It s been documented. Yeah, and it s a great book. I read it a couple times. H: We re coming along to getting late in the disk. Can we skip to the Sikhs? M: I never could put a case together. When I retired, they joked. McGorray doesn t close a case until he has twenty-two volumes. And I did have about twenty-to volumes on this area. [I was the] Polish speaking, Black Panther/Sikh expert. H: That an Irish name? M: McGorray? H: McGorray, yeah. M: It s probably Scottish. H: Scot. M: But, I ve been back to Ireland, Northern Ireland in 1994 and there s only, on Monagarrah Road there s two families of McGorrys. There s three brothers who ve got a fourth brother in England. And then there s a brother named Patrick McGorry. They both spell it without the a. It shouldn t have an a. And then there s two families in Cavan County and then there s a couple of McGorrays around Ireland. And then there s a few in Scotland. But there s two hundred and fifty McGorrays under four spellings in the United States. I can tell you pretty much what family in Ireland they came from. But I can t draw the connection between Scotland and Ireland. H: Well, shall we call it a day on the recording? M: Yeah. Let s call it a day. I didn t mean to bore you with all that. 31